Producer, Writer Defend Inaccuracies Of `Peter`

January 13, 1986|By Yardena Arar, Los Angeles Daily News

LOS ANGELES — Peter the Great or Peter the Inaccurate?

Marvin J. Chomsky, producer and co-director of the eight-hour NBC miniseries, and screenwriter Edward Anhalt spent most of a meeting with television writers last week fending off criticisms that at least the first two hours, which had just been screened for the first time, veered markedly from Robert K. Massie`s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on which the docudrama is based.

Chomsky and Anhalt admitted that some scenes were fabricated. For example, Peter`s close friend, Alexander Menshikov, played by Helmut Griem, is portrayed in the miniseries as a corpse-robbing peasant who saves young Peter`s life; in reality he was the son of a petty bureaucrat who never saved Peter`s life.

But Chomsky and Anhalt defended the historical distortions, saying that no one would watch a dry, historically faithful biography.

``Are you saying it is better to learn something wrong than not to learn anything at all?`` one reporter asked.